


same as he

by bastaerd



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: (morfin's death), Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, a couple of fuckbuddies reaching crises of the existential kind, fun with scurvy, ruminations on the process of dying, thigh-touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:20:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26626615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd
Summary: “You’re not hurt, are you?”“No, no, not at all. Even if I were, you know better than anyone yet here that it takes more than a shot to bring me down.”“As someone with the intimate knowledge of what it does take to bring you down, old boy, I’m inclined to agree.”
Relationships: Commander James Fitzjames/Lt Henry T. D. Le Vesconte
Comments: 12
Kudos: 25





	same as he

**Author's Note:**

> first time writing fitzconte. there are so many things i should be working on other than this but hey! sad, cold men with great hair (for now)!

The air rings with the bell toll of finality. For a moment, no one can believe what they have just seen before them, or perhaps they cannot comprehend, still, that a man can be alive one moment and dead the next. The men they had buried at Beechey-- at least then, there had been some indication, even if it was all said and done in less than a day. Consumption lives up to its name. It eats away at the men, makes a meal out of them, and sometimes it is more ravenous than at other times, but there is no one-moment-here, next-moment-gone the way they have seen in the past six months. Those have not so much been consumed as they have been swallowed whole.

There is nothing to eat of the pulp spattered across the rocks.

Morfin’s body is carried off to the stores tent, the canvas of his makeshift stretcher dripping slickly with blood and other matter. Concern is all but wasted on him now; there had been a place for it, but that window has recently passed, and their efforts are better spent elsewhere, their energy better reserved for those of them who still live. Morfin will receive a burial, and a few words from whichever lieutenant is unlucky enough to head that party. Hodgson, the poor foppish sod, is much more suited to sipping tea at the wardroom table than putting corpses in the ground. Le Vesconte does not envy him the job. The eerie part of it all is the open-and-closed quality Morfin’s death had to it. It had been nothing before it had been everything, demanding every ounce of every man’s attention and senses, and now it is over, and it has resumed being nothing. In the frigid air, not even the smell remains of the remains. That is how every man since Sir John has gone-- without sound or ceremony, carried off by men too tired to mourn formally, but not so much that they can’t lift a body working in twos. They each hold their own personal funerals for those dead who have earned a place in their memory, and the rest of it, they haul behind them along with the boat sledges, yoked to their grief as to their belongings. Both are beginning to feel less and less necessary.

The men are mostly gone from the scene. Crozier lingers, but he keeps turning in circles, brow knit and mouth pursed into a bloodless line, agitation writ into every crease in his face. That, figures Le Vesconte, is understandable. After all, the man had been shot at, or, rather, he had been standing in a vague line of fire, what with Morfin’s wavering aim. His lieutenants flit about in a similar state of anxiety, as though still suspended in the moment between the first shot and the second, the one which finally put an end to things. 

He finds his way to Fitzjames’ tent, and, with no door to knock at, lets himself in. There is Fitzjames, sitting at his desk, pen in hand but dry-nibbed, poised in the wrong way for writing. Le Vesconte announces his presence-- he clears his throat quietly, says, “You look rather about to eat a meal with that thing,” and indicates with a nod the pen in Fitzjames’ hand. The man’s eyes collect their focus once more, his lips pulling on only one side into a smile as dry as the nib as he places the pen down, turns so that he is sitting sidesaddle in his chair.

“Well, you must forgive me my poor table manners,” he responds, holding out one hand like a lady’s fan and waving towards himself. Le Vesconte takes that for an invitation, and steps forward, past the proper distance for a captain and his lieutenant and into the area inhabited by two old friends. Then, a step further past that, so that his knee brushes Fitzjames’ shin where one leg is folded gracefully over the other.

He hums, pretends to think. “Just this once,” he pronounces, placing a hand on Fitzjames’ knee and rubbing the side of it with his thumb, the smooth inseam keeping tempo each time his finger passes it. They are both tired from the journey here, and besides that, they are in the wrong state of mind for reacquainting themselves with each other, but the familiarity is a comfort.

After a spell, Fitzjames sighs. “What a day we’ve had,” he remarks, rubbing one-handedly at his eyes. “I’d tell myself that things weren’t so eventful back on the ships, but I’m afraid I would only be deluding myself. Envying the past for what I didn’t yet know and hadn’t yet seen.”

The both of them are quiet for a moment more, trading wry looks and tight-lipped smiles. Camp has gone quiet, and their silence in the tent seems terribly loud in comparison. The flickering of the lamplight makes up for the stillness, as does the rise and fall of Fitzjames’ chest and shoulders as he breathes, the flutter of a hair which hangs askew and dances on every exhale. His cream-colored jumper makes it easy to check him over surreptitiously for any wounds there, and, finding none, Le Vesconte skims Fitzjames’ thigh and then his calf, in search of a warm-welling bloodstain.

“You’re not hurt, are you?” he asks, to which Fitzjames sighs again, shakes his head.

“No, no, not at all,” he replies, before bringing his mouth into something that isn’t quite a smile, but is in the general bowed line of one. “Even if I were, you know better than anyone yet here that it takes more than a shot to bring me down.”

“As someone with the intimate knowledge of what it does take to bring you down, old boy, I’m inclined to agree.”

He says it with a fond look, bringing his hand from knee to cheek. His friend lets his head fall into it, lips just barely touching the heel of Le Vesconte’s palm. This way, he looks as exhausted as he probably feels, shoulders finally bowing under the weight of the world so long as he has Henry to prop him up-- Henry, who can’t help but kiss his brow now, to feel it unfurrow itself under his mouth. Then he strokes James’ cheek in earnest, cupping the square jaw and skirting his thumb along the chestnut hairline. He finds blood on his thumb when it reappears on James’ cheek.

At first, he squints at it, not believing it for what it is. It looks almost black in the yellow light, as if ink had gotten into the man’s hair and he has only just discovered it, but when he draws his hand away, rubbing his thumb and forefinger against one another, the color becomes clearer. Rich claret red. Red like velvet curtains-- red like cherries.

“James, you’re bleeding,” says Le Vesconte, examining the spot without urgency, but with intent now. That Fitzjames has not collapsed or worse is heartening; it means that at least he has not been bleeding overmuch, or not for very long. “Were you grazed?”

“What?” Fitzjames pulls away, eyes opening as he shoots Le Vesconte a look of confusion mixed with annoyance at being fussed over like this, especially in a way that involves mussing his hair. “No, of course not. I told you, I’ve not been injured at all.”

“Then what’s this?” Le Vesconte asks, removing his hand from Fitzjames’ hair and showing him his fingers. The pads of his first two fingers are dabbed with beads of blood, hanging ripe like fruits, but not heavy enough to fall in drops. There is also a smear at Fitzjames’ temple, which he cannot see. He can barely bring himself to look at Le Vesconte’s hand, but he seems to know what it is he shows him, because he closes his eyes against the sight. Le Vesconte catches him as he shakes his head, and steadies it-- gently, with a hand on Fitzjames’ cheek and their faces close as if angled for a kiss-- as he pulls the hair gently back from the spot where he had felt the blood a moment prior, and finds more. It does not spill from the graze of a stray bullet, but springs dark like currants against the scalp, collecting in round little berries of blood.

He knows, then, that it is of no use to ask _What is this?_ in the face of such an obvious answer. “How long?” he asks, instead.

Fitzjames does not try to draw back again. His eyelashes settle against his cheeks as he pulls in a steadying breath, answers, “Months.”

“How _many_ months, James.”

“Four.” He pulls his lips into a grimace, gestures towards his hairline in some strange mimicry of a self-addressed salute. “Nearly five, since I first spotted this.”

Le Vesconte says nothing to that. He can say nothing to that. There is nothing to say, not on his part. Rather, he swallows and nods. Kneels, then, before Fitzjames’ feet, and the captain unfolds his legs so that there is that much less distance to separate them. Bends his back ugly, so that when Le Vesconte’s hands drop to his knees, he can take the face of his dear friend in his hands and cradle it as had been done for him moments prior, passing comfort from one to the other.

“I would ask something of you, Henry,” he says, finally, and Le Vesconte nods. “Don’t tell the men of this. Don’t let Francis know, either.”

“You know I’m not one to wag my tongue, James.”

“I know.” A tired smile, but one more sincere than any other before it tonight; this, Le Vesconte can count as a victory and not feel as if he is taking a consolation prize, instead. “I know you’re not. You understand, I had to ask.”

“I do.”

Le Vesconte gives Fitzjames’ knees a slow squeeze, a melancholy reprise of the better-worn path of his hands. The knees will go, he remembers, as if over a distance. _You’ve always known how to dress up tragedy with a brave face, haven’t you,_ he thinks towards James, but does not say aloud. Instead, he turns his head, nudging his mouth against Fitzjames’ wrist, where his pulse is strongest. He does not kiss it, but feels it beat there against his lips, steady and without ornament, the simplest part of James that there is.

This is his warning, his hours of spluttering blood and seizing before the body goes still and becomes only that, his red morning sky. What has never been afforded them before on this ice, not with Gore or Sir John, he is allowed with Fitzjames, the period of decline and palliation before the end of it, when he will finally be forced to leave him under the shale. How fortunate that it kills so slowly. He will watch this thing make a meal out of him, taking its time to strip each limb of all its meat, to snap the femurs, suck out all the sweet marrow. Then, when there is nothing left, when all has been done away with in the belly of the beast, he will bury the bones and leave someone to tidy the table.

But there is time until then, before the meat is slaughtered.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://edward-little.tumblr.com).


End file.
